Technology, open source and fun stuff…

As part of the Extras Q&A process, the Maemo Community created a Testing Squad, in order to kick start the the testing process and provide better software for the Maemo users.

We’re correctly looking for some more testers, before start refining the Q&A processes, so if you like to test new shiny apps from our community developers, feel free to join the team, if you don’t feel ready or without enough skills for this task, you still can keep following the group activities and doing some testing in the easier areas.

For those that didn’t attended my presentation at the Maemo Summit (videos are still MIA ), I added some new features in BlueMaemo for Maemo5, one of these feature is the ability to send events using the accelerometer motion, is still in a very early stage, but as you can see in the video below, you can already play simple games.

BlueMaemo needs a lot of love before entering Maemo Extras, but unfortunately this month I don’t have plans for more improvements, I’ve a lot of other things to do and also I’ve to start job hunting (Know a position for a talented SW devel ? ), but I appreciate suggestions for improvements and bug reports. Big thanks for all alpha testers that helped a lot so far.

If you want to test the alpha version of BlueMaemo, you can grab it in the Extras-devel repository, please remember that the software in that repository is not intended for end users, before enable this repository, read this post.

The accelerometer control is enabled via the button “one” and “two”(experimental air mouse) in the gamepad profile. More instructions here.

Was a good surprise this afternoon when lcuk (Gary Birkett) told me that my alphish software is featuring in a Engadget article, seems that our beloved N900 is getting a lot of attention, even from Engadget :p.

Thanks Engadget for quoting my intentions in the article about the PS3 support, and yes my name is Valério Domingos Valério, that’s not a typo .

A big thanks also to Wazd (Andrew Zhilin) for the new UI concepting & design.

I know that the Q&A system needs improvements and we’re experiencing some outage due to the servers move, well that’s the reason why this is a challenge

The deal is, test the apps currently in Extras-testing in order to promote them to Extras and make them available for all N900 users, simple isn’t ?

Currently we’ve 82 free apps in Extras, so we need 18 more, to make things even simpler for you, I made a list with apps that in my opinion are ready for Extras. I chose the apps below because they don’t have any flaws reported so far, and also because they can be in Extras before the end of the year respecting the 10 days of quarantine required by the Q&A criteria. Feel free to suggest any app that I missed, commenting here.

Note1: I’m not saying to thumb up all of these apps, you should rate them according to the Q&A criteria, some will end up in Extras others don’t.

Note2: The links below might disappear when the packages are promoted to Extras.

Here is the list:

GPE Suite: Those apps don’t have the full Fremantle UI, but they’re usable, the author says that ported the apps for “completeness”, maybe if there’s enough interested he will improve them

After run the cool Qt/s60 demos produced by Ariya on my phone, I decided to test if Qt is really cross-platform . Well, I’ve to say that I’m really impressed, the demos run smoothly on my desktop and as you can see below on my n810

Runs out of the box, I only made a small change in order to assign the device volume buttons to the three animation effects: Slide, Flip, and Rotate, because the menu doesn’t work, probably need some integration with hildon (I’m a Qt noob : ) )

An propriety used in this demo (setOpacity) only exist in Qt 4.5 onwards, and the available version on the maemo repositories is the 4.4, so I commented some lines of code, my changes led to a bug as you can see in the video, the main weather state icon isn’t correctly updated. Note that the demo runs out of the box without any change, but due to the old Qt version used, the animations aren’t shown without a small fix.

The third Qt/s60 demo requires more changes, because of the use of input methods, let’s hope that everything run out of the box in Fremantle.

Yesterday I received a feedback comment here, saying that BlueMaemo can be used to control games in some S60 devices (Thanks Hath!!!), so just tried with my 5800 and the result is in the video above . Playing those games with the tv-out feature of the phone is even cooler

“Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world.”

As some already know, a new version of BlueMaemo rolled out in the last Thursday. BlueMaemo 0.3 is mostly a bug-fix release, but some new features are also available.

BlueMaemo v0.3 Changelog:

* Added support for the hardware keyboard in all profiles
* Added support for ‘key combos’ (e.g: ctrl+f, ctrl+alt+f6,…)
* Added Ctrl, Alt and F1 to F11 keys in the virtual keyboard
* Fixed bug in the bluetooth adapter state
* Moved configuration files to /etc/bluemaemo/
* Added back buttons in the ‘wait for connection’ and ‘process connection’ screens
* Fixed the sdl/openGL keystrokes bug

In other news, the BlueMaemo bug tracker was moved to the official maemo bugzilla (Thanks Andre), so now on you should report bug and submit feature requests (enhancement) there.

I would like to thank everyone that submitted bug reports and feature request, especially our package master Qwerty12 for some tips about the debian packaging, and Pycage that sent me a lot of outputs, that helped me fix a bug related to the keystrokes sent to games written in SDL/OpenGL.

Next developments will target Fremantle and improvements in the PS3 support.

I would like to give more time to my open source projects, but right now my thesis work is eating most of my time .